The Ocean at the End of the Lane

Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2013

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Introduction-Chapter 4

Chapters 5-9

Chapter 10-Epilogue

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Themes

Caught Between Two Families

As a young boy, the narrator briefly moved back and forth between his own home and the magical Hempstock family. He loves his parents but chafes at their inability to understand him; he loves the Hempstocks, who care for him and understand him vastly better than he does himself, but knows he can’t live in their world. His struggle speaks to the stresses of bright children who feel caught between the limits of their world and the wonders of their imagination.

The boy’s parents are decent people with good jobs, and support their son as he pursues books and quieter hobbies, but they don’t quite understand him or the loneliness he feels as an outsider among other children. To his father, the boy is a disappointment: “He did not ask for a child with a book, off in its own world. He wanted a son who did what he had done: swam and boxed and played rugby, and drove cars at speed with abandon and joy” (234). Meanwhile, his mother must work, and she’s generally too busy to give him the attention he needs. The boy’s sister dislikes him and takes every opportunity to bad-mouth him to their parents. Finally, his father falls under Ursula’s sway and nearly kills the boy for refusing to cooperate with the new nanny.

The boy escapes to Hempstock Farm, where the three Hempstocks welcome him as a beloved guest whom they care for with the kind of attentive quality missing at his home. They also do their utmost to protect him from Ursula and the hunger birds. Given the dangers he faces at home and the safety and comfort he feels at Hempstock Farm, the boy might easily wish to live full-time with the trio. He loves his parents, though, and wants to rid them of Ursula so he can return to them. The Hempstocks, for all their goodness, aren’t human, and they understand that life with them can distort the boy and put him in danger. In the end, Lettie must risk herself to save the boy, and she returns to the ocean inside the pond to recuperate, perhaps for decades.

To the Hempstocks, it’s best if the boy forgets what happened to him: Living with knowledge of the alternate universe at the farm will upend his life and prevent it from progressing in a human way. Ginnie Hempstock puts it: “You can’t know everything” (229). The boy’s visit with them must be temporary, so Old Mrs. Hempstock manipulates his memory. He thus forgets about the Hempstocks, lives out his childhood with his own family, and grows up to have a wife and children and a career in the arts. Still, from time to time he returns to Hempstock Farm to reassess his life in light of what he learned about the true nature of reality. Despite Old Mrs. Hempstock’s influence, the narrator’s life will always be affected by the deep, if barely conscious, understanding that part of him and his artistic work are forever connected to his once family, the Hempstocks.

The Depths Beneath the Shallows

Hempstock Farm is at once ordinary and unfathomably wondrous. Its many acres contain ordinary things and magical ones; its pond contains within it an immense ocean of power and wisdom, with one of its beings escaping to the human realm to become Ursula, a synthetic human that hides monstrous depths. These features suggest that, all around us, strange and even dangerous mysteries abide—that looks can be deceiving.

In terms of flora, Hempstock Farm contains crops, meadows, and woods, but among them lies an alternate reality: glowing plants, cats that grow like vegetables and must be pulled up by the roots to bring them to life, strange creatures that look like flapping tents and ache to interfere with humans, and weather patterns that show up at the farm and nowhere else. This alternate reality’s blending of flora and fauna, of unnatural phenomena, reinforces its unusual nature.

The narrator visits this alternate reality, and a worm from there works its way into his foot. It’s a minor irritant, but it contains Skarthach, the tent-shaped creature that Lettie tried to subdue. Once in the human realm, the creature torments the boy and his family in the form of Ursula, a nanny who slowly manipulates the family to do her bidding (by seducing the boy’s father and appealing to his sister’s hatred of him). A worm is what produces Ursula, whose attractive surface hides her depths of depravity.

Ursula’s presence in the wrong universe sets in motion a series of events that leads to the arrival of the hunger birds, spectral creatures that clean up stray bits of the magical universe caught in the human realm. The hunger birds are difficult to see, their bodies mere shadows, but they can consume entire worlds and leave only blankness behind. From the narrator’s perspective, they are an enemy of reality itself, but Lettie insists that both Ursula and the hunger birds are simply adhering to their nature (and that even “monsters” feel fear). What is evil to humankind is likely normal to these creatures. This also applies to the Hempstocks, who are relatively good-natured but nonetheless abide by otherworldly rules.

The pond behind Hempstock Farm is in fact a gateway to a vast underwater realm where beings exist beyond life, and where knowledge is infinite. As a young boy, the narrator gets placed into the pond and witnesses the fathomless underpinnings of reality. This ocean heals both the boy and Lettie. Without the Hempstocks’ presence, humans can’t see the pond’s oceanic traits; it’s a completely different form of reality that appears quite ordinary to outsiders.

Hempstock Farm thus contains hidden depths filled with titanic forces and horrific dangers. From these depths erupts a vicious creature who invades the human world through an innocuous worm, then hides herself as innocent-looking boarder Ursula. Shadowy, almost unnoticeable creatures appear and consume Ursula, and it takes an unassuming pond that hides a vast realm of creative power to save the boy and Lettie. The boy’s ordeal serves as a warning: Great evil and danger can lurk behind innocent-looking things.

Guilt and Responsibility

While visiting the alternate reality at Hempstock Farm with Lettie, the narrator accidentally lets go of her hand, which gives an evil entity an opportunity to literally worm its way into the human world. The boy blames himself, and tries to sacrifice himself to save his family and the world, but the Hempstocks ultimately take responsibility for the boy’s mistakes and protect him from the worst of their effects. In this respect, the story is a study in blame and the extent to which people, including children, are accountable for their own actions.

The boy means well when he lets go of Lettie’s hand: He wants to protect her from a projectile hurled by a malevolent creature who lives in the magical realm at the farm. But in doing so, the boy breaks his pact with Lettie, and his action enables the creature to penetrate his world. All the problems that ensue seem to derive from his mistake. The boy’s father falls under the spell of Ursula, and betrays his wife by having an affair with the nanny. When the boy protests that Ursula is a bad person, his father becomes so angry that he tries to drown him. The boy forgives his father because the man is likely under the influence of Ursula, and because his initial mistake is what brought her into their lives. Still, the man is an adult, and he, too, is arguably responsible for his own actions.

The boy nevertheless feels guilty about Ursula’s presence and does what he can to fix things. He tries to alert his parents about the dangers of Ursula, but they brush off his warnings or punish him when he refuses to cooperate with her. Trying once and for all to resolve the supernatural problems he has caused, the boy attempts to sacrifice himself to the hunger birds to thereby save his family and humankind. On the other hand, the Hempstocks understand that the boy is just a child, and his mistake is forgivable because the real fault lies with them. Old Mrs. Hempstock knows the blame should fall on Lettie, since she brought the boy into an alternate reality of which he had no knowledge or preparation. Lettie, too, understands this, and risks herself to save the boy from the hunger birds. Though the narrator isn’t aware of the truth until later, Lettie fails: The birds achieve their goal of cleaning up Ursula’s presence by consuming the boy’s heart, which contains a small piece of the alternate reality. Lettie uses the Hempstocks’ magical pond to revive the boy, lest his death be the ultimate consequence of her own mistake. This action exhausts her powers, and she, too, enters the pond to recuperate.

In the novel, even goddesses face dilemmas and uncertainties, and the Hempstocks must deal with problems that tax their own vast strengths. Like humans, they face moral dilemmas that can’t be erased with a wave of their hands or by blaming others (though they do manipulate the boy’s memory to spare him future pain). That they understand this and risk themselves to correct mistakes speaks to their integrity. Both they and the boy have good intentions and work heroically to achieve them; together, they somehow find a way through the worst of their ordeal and right the problems in which they all had a hand.

The narrator thus learns that responsibility begins the moment a person realizes they’ve erred, and it ends when the problem is solved. Knowing that he could have behaved differently is the key to finding a solution. This understanding can happen at any age and to anyone, even immortal beings.